I was on my way to my six-monthly (ish) hospital appointment this morning, and feeling distinctly glum, most definitely not wanting to go, when the news came on the radio and cheered me up slightly. Some excellent news for UK RA patients generally, I’m delighted to say: NICE has reversed its ludicrous policy of refusing to treat patients who failed on one anti-TNF with another. Anti-TNFs are not all the same, so saying that because a patient fails on one they won’t benefit from a different one is patently absurd, but that’s exactly what NICE, the patently absurd National Institute for ‘Clinical Excellence’ had decided to do. From later this year though, patients who fail on one anti-TNF will be allowed another go. (I think only one more go, but that’s better than none!)

Hopefully I shall never need to worry about this from a personal point of view as I seem to be doing well on the methotrexate. Inevitably the three-week flare I’ve just come through has now passed (just in time for the hospital appointment, of course) and didn’t show up in the bloods, so it’s not being taken at all seriously. Still, on the bright side it DOES seem to be over, so next time I shall just have to gird my loins and nag the hospital while I’m HAVING a flare, if only so they get to see it!

So that was the mildly irritating.

The bad is physio – not my physio of course; she’s still lovely. But apparently, ‘In order to be in line with private practice’ they are going to restrict all patients to a maximum of six appointments before a re-referral is required. It’s a very confusing system which I’ll explain in another post, but I can probably get re-referred. However, if I normally have physio twice monthly, I’ll have to get rereferred every three months and then wait around five weeks for an appointment, where presumably I won’t be guaranteed to see my lovely physio and will be reassessed each time, even though after a couple of years I think between the two of us we have a pretty good idea of what works! (Anyway, more about this whinge later!) The bright side is that I have at least had her for around two years, and when I started seeing her I thought then that they’d kick me out after six appointments, so I suppose I can’t complain. (Oh wait – yes I can …)

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A bit about me

My name is not Pollyanna and I'm not a penguin. If you'd not worked out the last bit you should probably stop reading this and seek out a psychologist.

This is a blog about me and rheumatoid arthritis - sounds like fun, huh? Well I'm hoping it'll be a bit more fun than it sounds - hence the Pollyanna part. I'm going to try to stay positive about it and play 'Pollyanna's glad game' - finding reasons to be cheerful basically.

If you really want to know more see the 'About me' page.

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